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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5996898" data-attributes="member: 2067">My play experience last night says otherwise. The fighter player was able to change his behavior on the fly by spending CS dice in ways that weren't available to other characters. The rogue certainly wasn't able to pull that off. That psychological difference is valuable, and part of the reason different classes exist: for a different play experience.Tossing around CS dice is a much different feel than planning your prepared spells or hoarding your willpower. Much more spontaneous and flexible. That fits right in a fighter's niche.I'm sorry, was this a final release? Is WotC going under? Is it written in stone and forever unchangable? It ain't too late. In fact, it's the PERFECT time to talk about this kind of stuff. This being a playtest and all. I'm not a fan of how similar Willpower and Favors are (and how similar both are to Vancian magic). I WANT Sorcerers to have unlimited magic and Warlocks to power their spells with souls. CS dice are vaguely similar on a very high level, but at the level of how they feel during play, they are quite different, since they recharge so fast and can be used for anything in the fighter's repertoire whenever they need it. Which is ultimately the point: classes should feel unique. A Warlord that copies the Fighter mechanics "just a little different" is going to risk not feeling unique. You don't need to know much about them. Wizards are studious and careful. Sorcerers have plentiful magic but lack variety. Warlocks get gifts from their patrons. Clerics channel divine might. Fighters are masters at hitting things and getting hit in a thousand different ways. Rogues are sneaky and like to surprise. Barbarians fly into destructive rages that leave them vulnerable. Rangers flash a flurry of attacks and move around a lot. You have all the information you need baked into the archetype. Pick one and go.Thus, you also don't need to worry about re-learning your game or having "lesser" mechanics. Each archetype (each class) is supported by unique mechanics that help define that class, and you know you want those mechanics if you want to play that archetype because those mechanics support that archetype. If you want to play someone sneaky and surprising, play a rogue. The mechanics of the rogue then encourage you to be sneaky and surprising, and make the player worry about being discovered, and otherwise support that archetype. If you don't want that, don't play that. Whatever else you play will have its own supporting mechanics.And lets try and not put words in my mouth. I said it needs to be carefully considered, not that it's impermissible. I'm sure there may be circumstances that call for shared class mechanics. The key is to make sure that those mechanics really are the best ones for the job and not just the new hotness that has everyone all frothing at the mouth to make it the core mechanic of an entire edition. The two questions ("Why MUST this mechanic be used here? And then why can't the new class have its' own mechanic, or be part of the old class?") are there to discourage thoughtless mechanical laziness and to encourage honest assessments of suitability. If it is the best mechanic and the new class is incapable of using another mechanic and the new class must be a new class, it should be used. I don't believe this situation is very common, though I imagine it will crop up (Rituals come to mind as a place where a shared mechanic probably works fine). I've got similar concerns about Advantage/Disadvantage replacing raw bonuses, for the record, even though it's not linked to class. Only, encouraging a character who never crosses the streams of magic and martial might because one doesn't give them caster levels and the other doesn't give them Expertise Dice is neither appropriate nor interesting. In my view, you need to have a tight link between a mechanic, the play experience, and the archetype.If my "spontaneous natural spellcaster" uses Vancian magic that they must prepare from a spellbook each morning just because That Is The Magic Mechanic, that's not great (though it is what you were told to do up until 3e, and even in a lot of places IN 3e). If my rampaging barbarian needs to make fiddly round-to-round mechanics decisions about where to put some abstract points because That Is The Fighting Mechanic, that's also not great, for the same reason. This way, the mechanic reinforces the archetype via psychology, rather than hiding on the other side of a wrought iron fence made of tigers and never crossing over because it needs to remain generic enough to apply to half the classes in the game. A mechanic must serve the gameplay experience, and to do that, it needs to be closely linked to the experience you want to achieve. I wouldn't use Sanity mechanics or a 3d6 bell curve in heroic high fantasy any more than I'd use a hammer to perform surgery. I am resistant to the idea of using Expertise dice to represent everything that's good at swinging around metal for the same reasons: I don't want a Barbarian experience that is like a Fighter experience and like a Ranger experience and like a Paladin experience and like a Rogue experience and like a Ninja experience. I want a different experience for each class, and for that different experience, I want a mechanic that is going to deliver it to me, not something adapted from some other class just because it happened to be laying around and looked kind of flexible.</blockquote>

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